Art in the Park

Last Saturday was a perfect day, a beautiful day for a book signing in the park. When I mentioned the signing to a friend of mine she gasped and asked, “Were you all alone in the park?” I laughed. “No, it was an art in the park event,” I told her, “and I was surrounded by people displaying their homemade and ingenious crafts.”

“My craft is writing,” I called out to anyone walking by my table where my book and a couple of toys from my childhood – like jacks and a kaleidoscope - were displayed.

I marveled at the number of people who showed up that day in Mondauk Park Commons, where parts of my book had been written.  And I marveled at the number who stopped and listened as I told them about Rude Awakening.

As I sat talking to one elderly man, who was about my age, he suddenly told me his wife had passed away in April and, remembering my own loss, I felt my heart move toward him, although I had to laugh when he told me he was a mathematician and “not at all a reader.”   

As the hours passed I marveled again and again at the things people freely shared with me about themselves until midway through the day when I realized that just like me, everyone is looking, not for a new art or craft, but for someone to see them, someone to hear them because where one connection is broken, another must be forged.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE